Go
ahead and tend to your sulky friend — helping others can protect
you from the negative effects of stress, research
suggests.pedrosimoes7
via flickr

You may think you're too overwhelmed with your
personal troubles to cheer up a sad friend, the same way
you're too busy at work to take a moment to recognize a
colleague.

But research suggests you're hardly doing
yourself any favors by focusing on your own problems at the
expense of supporting others.

According to a new small study, helping others
can actually protect you from the negative effects of
stress.

For the study, researchers at the University of California,
Los Angeles and the Yale University School of Medicine recruited
77 adults between ages 18 and 44. Each evening for two weeks,
participants received a reminder to complete a series of
questionnaires.

One questionnaire asked about any stressful
events they'd experienced, related to work, relationships,
finances, and other domains. Another asked participants to
indicate any prosocial (helping) behaviors they'd demonstrated,
from holding open a door to helping out with schoolwork. Other
surveys asked participants to report how often they'd experienced
certain positive and negative emotions that day, and to rate
their mental health for that day on a scale from 0 to 100.

Results showed that, on days when participants
were more helpful than usual, they experienced no decrease in
positive emotion or mental health quality, and only a slight
increase in negative emotion in response to stress. On the other
hand, when they were less helpful than usual, participants
experienced lower positive emotion and higher negative emotion in
response to stress.

The researchers write: "Results suggest that even brief periods of supporting or
helping others might help to mitigate the negative emotional
effects of daily stress."

At this point, it's unclear exactly why and how
helping behavior minimized the detrimental effects of stress. The
researchers propose that supporting others might distract you
from your own misery, at least temporarily. Helping others, they
say, might also stimulate certain biological systems that tamp
down the emotional stress response.

Of course, the study has some notable
limitations, namely that all participants were Caucasian, so
these findings not apply to the general population.

The researchers also acknowledge the necessity
of future research that directly manipulates participants' stress
levels and also tracks their stress response and helping behavior
multiple times per day, as opposed to just once.

Still, the main takeaway seems to be: Lend a
hand, no matter how frazzled you feel. You could be doing the
recipient and yourself a favor.